Universal Basic Income – Is This Good Banking?

Scotland is about to test giving certain people a universal basic income – unconditional cash payments to live on – for those unemployed and at the bottoms of the pay scale. The idea is that everyone has a basic standard of living and that many of the dollars used will be directed out of existing (inefficient) welfare bureaucracies.

If those at the lowest economic level spend more, it is called cash flow. Cash flow is the basic principal of banking – without cash flow nothing happens. It will be interesting to see if these experiments lead to more robust economies. How many more jobs might this kind of spending create? How many more people will it bring into the workforce because externalized folks now have a place to sleep, shower, eat and then go to work?

The initial universal basic income experiments will be carried out in the Scottish cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife and North Ayshire. Scotland is just one of the nations in the United Kingdom that has, in recent years, faced tremendous food insecurity and hunger.